On Wednesday, January 28, 2015 at 10:20:02 PM UTC, Huge wrote:
On 2015-01-28, Ferretygubbins wrote:
I know this is OT but I rather suspect that some of you will be able to
help.

Boy1 (13) is interested in learning how to write code and so I would like to
set him up with a toolkit for his PC (Windows) unfortunately my programming
days are somewhat in the past and restricted to MUMPS

Blimey. The first person I've ever "met" who knows what MUMPS is. I was
a MUMPS programmer for several years in the late 70s.


which was archaic even
back then. Has anyone any suggestions for a suitable platform? As ever the
cheaper the better.

Massachusetts Utility Medical Programming System

The London Hospital Whitechapel had a very good pharmacy system written in Mumps back in the late 70's to mid 80's. They also had a blunderbus Univac 418-II with 96 VDU terminals around the hospital and that was all written in RTOS assembler, using punched cards !!.

AFAIK MUMPS allowed a file to be regarded as an enormous table of records, with no need for the programmer to be concerned about disk handling. The Redifon Keycheck and Seecheck systems of a similar era had vaguely similar features.

I'd go for Python. Starting here;

https://www.python.org/about/gettingstarted/


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